Telltale Adds Multiplayer Voting Mode To Future Games

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Playing The Wolf Among Us with my wife was one of my favorite gaming experiences ever, so I’m pretty excited that Telltale has seen the potential and will be adding a new multiplayer mode with upcoming releases, starting with Batman, that will let participants vote during decisions to decide the outcome of the story.

The multiplayer will function like this: at the beginning of future Telltale games (starting with Batman on August 2) you can choose to turn on “Crowd Play.” By doing so, you’re provided with a URL that you can give to other participants who can “join” the game by going to that website using any device and logging in. Doing so let’s them vote on decisions happening in the game like which line of dialogue to say while also providing live feedback of how each person has voted. There’s also a thumbs up and thumbs down system too, so you can express your disdain when everyone ignores your well-intentioned but poorly thought out suggestions.

Crowd Play comes with two modes, one that gives voters full control over which decisions are made and one that still includes the voting but allows the actual player to override any decisions they may want to. Just like in regular Telltale games, each episode will be punctuated with a feed detailing the usual statistics of how other people played the game but will now include feedback on how participants voted. Job Stauffer, head of creative communications at Telltale, told Shacknews in an interview that multiplayer could support anywhere from two to 2000-plus voters.

Unfortunately, the system isn’t well-suited to Twitch streaming quite yet because of latency issues, but giving a thumbs up is still viable—which I’m sure is more decipherable for a streamer than the explosion of emoticons and memes they typically get from the chat.

While it’s a bummer that there’s some hoops to jump before we get Twitch Plays Batman, I have to say this has made me a lot more excited for future Telltale games. Gathering up some friends and having an interactive movie night actually sounds like a genuinely fun time.

7 Comments

I enjoyed a lot of their games but the unskippable spoilers given in the “next time!” bits put me off completely. They don’t even make sense when you own the whole game – you’re about to play the next chapter anyway!

My wife loves to watch me play Bioware games and said our time playing SWTOR together – which has voting on the decisions made (though has the added bonus of sometimes getting to see the vote-losing character look sad/appalled!) – was her favourite time playing an MMO (and we’ve played MMOs together for a long, long time).

I mean, this is all assuming we’re in control, and can choose who is voting and so on – we wouldn’t want random strangers voting on our game, but it sounds like we can choose.

So this sounds pretty awesome, frankly, and would definitely be a reason to pick up Telltale games in future. I hope they manage to retroactively apply it to stuff as well as going forwards.